You might think that with us now in the middle of winter, and with the U.S. Congress wrestling with SOPA, an anti-piracy bill symbolic of the corporate paranoia where entertainment is being being stolen by all / bought by none, that there would not only be fewer releases each year, but less labels surviving, but as this month's tally indicates, people are still interested in film music releases, be it classic or new material in digital or physical form.
The best way to read the non-death of music distribution is how the industry needed to find new venues, hyper-target niche markets, and adapt by welcoming digital yet keeping physical in mind for collectors and audiophiles wanting an actual compact CD.

I've sort of bounced back & forth between the two mediums, happy with the little space digital music occupies, but kind of fond of an actual disc, knowing it represents the best sound, even though formats like flac are perfectly fine. It may also be the peculiar comfort in seeing music fans half my age wanting turntables, buying old vinyl (deliberately), and being excited about building a platter collection.

Major labels have little interest in niche markets, which is why, like the major film studios, their core business will be in primarily producing new material and licensing back catalogue material to indie labels for set time periods. The studios have the best masters which gives them an edge over copies of music or film circulating in the public domain realm, and with indie labels ostensibly servicing niche / collector / fan markets & interests, there's an obvious need to work with the best possible elements.

Besides, if indie labels and producers weren't working with major labels, it may be likely that a lot of material would remain uncatalogued, undiscovered, and we would'nt see the regular waves of expanded and premiere releases of complete original scores. Case in point: Spain's Quartet Records recently announcing a February release of a Casino Royale 2-disc edition featuring Burt Bacharach's original film score.

Even if you hate the 1967 film and music, this represents the ideal scenario of 'lost' or unfound material being not only discovered, but making its way into the commercial realm where it belongs. This could apply to any musical idiom: the reason, for example, why we have elaborate jazz sets isn't because major labels have dedicated teams of historians and archivists working in the vaults, but a shared interest among a few indie & in-house people, and perhaps a sense of competition: if the people behind Mosaic Records set the standard for jazz reissues with their exhaustive sets, then it behooves labels to follow the meticulous production values if they want to re-sell catalogue material to fans anew in shinier, happier boxed sets.

To that end, I'll move on to the score tally below, plus some new soundtrack reviews: Tyler Bates' engrossing score for the sci-fi thriller The Darkest Hour [M] and Craig Richey's Answers to Nothing [M] (both from Lakeshore Records); Danny Elfman's complete music for Scrooged [M] (La-La Land); Howard Shore's A Dangerous Method [M] and John Williams' War Horse [M] (Sony); and the original Casino Royale[M] album, which Kritzerland released a year ago, coupled with a transfer of the original vinyl for purists unable to get their hands on a vintage Colgems platter.

I just got my Bernard Herrmann at Fox box from Varese, and while it was hefty at $200 smackaroons, had a I hesitated, I would've lost the chance to own this monster set and enjoy 14 CDs of pure Herrmann Heaven. (I still feel peeved I hesitated to snap up Mimic, but let's not go there again.)

Reviews of that beast-box will come soon, as I'm trying to tie some film & DVD reviews to the respresented scores. A handful of the titles are out in Spain on DVD - White Witch Doctor, King of the Khyber Rifles - and I wouldn't be surprised if Twlight Time has one or two Herrmann titles up their sleeves. (Now that The Roots of Heaven is a reality, hopefully they have their sights on Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, sporting a rich surround mix, Herrmann's dreamy score, and Robert Wagner playing a really, really happy Greek fisherman.)

Coming soon will be a pair of John Guillermin film reviews, including Rapture (Twilight Time), which sports an isolated Georges Delerue score. The label has also announced Blu-ray editions of Pal Joey, sporting an isolated score track and an extra called "Backstage and at Home with Kim Novak"; and Swamp Water, the Jean Renoir film, sporting an isolated score track of David Buttolph's music.

Buttolph is all but forgotten among the Golden Age composers, so this brings some of his music into the commercial realm. Personal favourites include his music for the Alan Ladd submarine thriller The Deep Six (1958), Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), and perhaps his best-known work, House of Wax (1953), which appears in rich stereo on Warner Home Video's DVD.

The Score Tally:

Titles listed include current, upcoming, and some announced for February.

The term "ltd." denotes titles released in limited quantities because collectors need to be driven crazy now and then.

The black dots (".") between titles could be interpreted as moderne spacing devices meant to break up the visual monotony of text clusters, or perhaps the point at which I *&%$# gave up in figuring out why the skilled minds behind MS Word, HTML, Dreamweaver, and Word Press can't #*&^!! figure out how to permit fluid cutting & pasting of text and HTML code without spacing aberrations.

It's 2012, for God's sake. If a netbook can fly the space shuttle, why can't you figure out code that guarantees what originates in any word processing software remains intact in its final published format?